Free Material Girl by Louise Kean Page A

Wonderful, wonderful, ingenious! And so the process would begin again that night, with whistles and bells and punches, a mini war, before the place could be blown. But by the following midday they were back again …’
    ‘Tristan?’ I interrupt, as he flicks the back of his hand with an eyebrow brush, ‘how do you know all of this?’
    ‘Research, Make-up.’
    ‘Oh,’ I say. ‘It must have taken you ages!’
    ‘Not really. I could tell you the same about most of the theatres. I have to know the history of a theatre before I work there. It would be like you applying a new eye-shadow, say, to a client, and not knowing where it came from or what was in it …’ he says with a smile.
    ‘Oh. Right. Exactly,’ I say, desperately trying to remember any of the eye shadow science I learnt at college. Nope, mostly forgotten.
    ‘Where was I?’ he asks.
    ‘Drunks and whores who wouldn’t leave,’ I say.
    ‘Right. Well. One black January London night when the construction unit had taken all that they could, soaked in swearing and spitting and the vomit and faeces being thrown at them in buckets, and the urine being sprayed on them from third-floor windows like vile spurts from peculiar water pistols, they took action. Forty-seven drunks and tramps and whores vanished the night they blew up the old hat factory, at one a.m.’
    Tristan widens his eyes.
    ‘Hell!’ I say, appalled.
    ‘The explosion woke the bits of the city that were sleeping, but nobody cared. And by nine a.m. all the rubble had been cleared.’
    ‘My God, they just blew up all those people?’ I ask, confused.
    Tristan nods his head theatrically.
    ‘Yes, Make-up, they did. Business is business, and they had plans in place, people were already on the payroll. The architect of The Majestic, Henry Lee, was the brother of the renowned architect Charles Lee, who had just remodelled Her Majesty’s Theatre into an Opera House to gushing critical acclaim. The Times said, “ Charles Lee uses line with aconventional splendour .” Henry was twelve years younger than Charles, but two inches taller and with size twelve feet. Their mother had been startled by the pregnancy that was Henry, believing that at thirty-four she was well past childbearing age. Henry had always felt like a mistake, poor bastard. His mother looked bemused when she saw him. His father, the civil servant Charles Lee Senior, met Henry’s adoring stares with a mixture of irritation and anger. When Henry’s mother died of a blood disease at forty-four, Charles Lee Senior took a ten-year-old Henry to one side at her burial and whispered, “It was you. You were too much for her.”’ Tristan says it in a thick, comical Irish accent.
    ‘Tristan, are you making this up?’ I ask, irritated that he has taken me for a fool.
    ‘No! Absolutely not! Make-up, what would make you say such a thing?’
    ‘Well, you didn’t say they were Irish for a start.’
    ‘That was just for colour, Make-up – do you want this to be interesting or not?’
    ‘Can’t you just tell me about Dolly now?’ I ask, fidgeting.
    ‘Soon, Make-up. Patience is a virtue. Cleanliness is next to Godliness and patience is the hobby of angels.’
    I sigh. He gives me a reproachful look and carries on.
    ‘The Majestic was Henry’s first commission, and a fateful one. He dreamt of six tiers to seat two thousand people, but was plagued by doubts and insecurities, violently ripping up new plans, sometimes throwing them on the fire and beginning again. Then there would be nine tiers, then twelve, then twenty! At the age of thirty-three he had been drinking heavily for eight years, to soften London’s hard edges, even though he knew that softening hard edges was not necessarily an advantage for an architect. Henry had recently fallen savagely and obsessively in love with a Spanish prostitute named Vanessa who had long, thick dark hair like a mare’s, andwhich had never been cut. It was overrun with lice like wood mice in a